The Night the Lights Went Out: What the Dismantling of Federal Education Research Actually Cost

TLDR: Whether any federal efficiency was achieved through the dismantling of the federal education research infrastructure is dubious; what the public has lost is profound.

‍"I think my wife was just fired by DOGE.” This is what my husband said to a work colleague after receiving a call from me just over a year ago. I had awoken that morning to a flood of emails and text messages indicating that the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the independent research and statistics arm of the US Department of Education, had been largely dismantled overnight. As a former teacher who had transitioned into education research and evaluation, I had spent the prior decade serving IES-funded initiatives as a federal contractor. My work involved supporting state and local education agency research priorities and studying which programs and policies were effective in improving student outcomes. Over the course of that fateful week in February 2025, DOGE terminated more than 100 research contracts collectively worth over a billion dollars. Effective immediately.

‍What IES Actually Was

‍Among the many things I’ve learned over the past year is that much of the public was unaware of what IES is or why its independence mattered. Most Americans did not realize that data reported in the news about student achievement in the US or data about school performance on real estate websites was often available only because of IES. Even schools and teachers participating in IES-funded research or using IES-funded resources did not necessarily connect these projects to their funding source.

‍IES was the only research and statistics arm of any federal department that was independent and nonpartisan. The Institute was deliberately designed to shine a light on what actually works for students while insulated from political pressure. It was small but mighty. While comprising just 0.3% of the US Department of Education budget in 2024, the work of IES touched every level of the system in every state and jurisdiction. IES funded a wide range of educational research, data, and evidence use initiatives, all focused on improving the lives of students through evidence-based policies, programs, and practices.

‍What Lost Potential Looks Like

‍One IES program in particular, the Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs), drew me to this work over a decade ago. I saw a posting for a position that would involve conducting research in partnership with state leaders and districts for one of the RELs, applied for the role, and got the job. This was the beginning of my involvement in REL research and other IES initiatives, which continued for the better part of the last decade.

‍As just one among many hundreds of examples of lost potential through recent cuts at IES, I was most recently involved with two related projects focused on using effective strategies for improving outcomes for elementary age students struggling in mathematics. This is a critically important topic given that only about half of the nation’s grade four students are performing at grade level in math. With state partners through one of the RELs, we were developing a suite of professional learning tools, grounded in effective research-backed strategies, to support educators’ capacity to support students struggling with math. A related project was evaluating the implementation of these professional learning resources and whether they positively impacted teacher practice and student outcomes.

‍The work involved a talented development team, educators across multiple states who helped develop the resources and were participating in the research, and an expert team of evaluation researchers. The projects were weeks away from the final round of student and teacher data collection across 30+ school districts when they were abruptly terminated. Millions of dollars in investment were lost, along with potential answers to one of the most persistent challenges in elementary education. The contract termination didn't pause this work; it erased it.

The Field-Wide Impact

A year ago, hundreds of staff at IES and the US Department of Education lost their jobs overnight. But much of the actual research, evaluation, and data collection initiatives funded by IES were carried out by experts who work outside of these federal agencies, part of a national model of research and development dating back to the 1960s. Hundreds if not thousands of researchers and other experts working as federal contractors and grantees on behalf of IES and other federal departments also lost their work overnight. Faculty are losing funding — not just from IES but from NIH and NSF. An entire ecosystem of people who had dedicated their careers to evidence-based practice has been destabilized. As a colleague put it recently, “My LinkedIn looks like a graveyard.” This wasn't ivory tower research disconnected from schools, but the infrastructure that moved findings from studies into classrooms, that helped state leaders understand what their data meant, and that gave districts access to expertise they do not have the resources to build on their own.

Who Loses Most

I spent the first part of my career as a teacher working in K-12 public schools with multilingual learners and students with disabilities in Wisconsin, Colorado, and California. IES and the Department of Education broadly existed to hold a light on those children and other vulnerable student groups. When that infrastructure disappears, some students and communities lose more.

The loss is real. But before we talk about rebuilding, we need to be honest about what wasn't working — and what a better version of this system could look like. That's the conversation the field is starting to have. And it's one in which the people who worked inside can offer a uniquely important perspective.

NOTE: This is the first in a three-part series.